Africa SF (Paradoxa 25, 2013)

Contents

Review: Andrea Hairston, The Los
     Angeles Review of Books

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“Superbly curated and impressively recondite, these essays are as provocative as they are wide-ranging – from the weird that is Sun-Ra to African Apocalypse to the Wakanda homeland of Marvel’s Black Panther . . .  and for someone like me, a child of the African diaspora, and a full-out futurist geek, it is indispensable.”
– Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Whether it’s musician Sun Ra, American SF writer Octavia Estelle Butler or the Ghanaian AfroCyberPunk writer Jonathan Dotse, this issue of one of North America’s most lively journals is crammed with wonderfully wide windows opening onto African and African-inspired writing and music around from the world. You really don’t want to miss this one!”
– Samuel R. Delany, author of Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

“Franz Fanon opened his seminal book The Wretched of the Earth with the bold statement: ‘Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men’. There is something intrinsically science fictional about the new beings and temporal disjunctions in the colony, the postcolony and the trajectories of uneven development. In this special issue of Paradoxa, guest editor Mark Bould has brought together an outstanding group of critics to think through the conjuncture of Africa and science fiction really for the first time with proper rigour and critical sophistication. The collection contains Bould’s essential outline of the African re-functioning of science fictional tropes, and some brilliant interventions into the history of comics, colonial adventure fiction and film. This heady brew is rounded off with John Rieder’s powerful reflections on the weird and wonderful world of Sun Ra’s ‘occult jazz’ experimental mythology. This collection breaks new ground: the horizon of science fiction studies has just been expanded again.”
– Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College